EP 207 Say Goodbye to Hourly Rates: How to Command Higher Prices

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This is the Align youe True north podcast and I'm your host, Brooke Elder.

I'm so excited to dive in today's topic because you see there's a costly trap that is keeping talented operations professionals, admins.

If you're doing any sort of implementation work, it's keeping you stuck at those low rates.

And you probably don't even realize that you're even stuck in this.

I'm going to walk you through a process that one of our clients went from charging $35 an hour to making the shift.

Now she's getting $5,000 a month clients.

So I'm going to share you with you the exact process that we helped her and walked in order to make these changes.

So that way you can start seeing the value in what it is that you do and you can start commanding higher prices.

And it all comes down to this hourly trap that so many of us are in.

We are stuck in thinking that we need to trade our time for money, so trade our hours for dollars.

And you don't need to be stuck in this trap.

So right now if you are charging, let's say that even if you have packages and you have a 20 hour a month package, you may have a 50 hour a month package, whatever that may be, that is the thing that's actually keeping you stuck.

Or if you are a freelancer, you're an ops professional and you are just charging by the hour for the things that you do.

Here's the biggest problem with that.

Even if you're say Your rate is 150 an hour, the problem with this is that the better that you get and the faster that you get at things, you actually are going to start giving yourself a pay decrease.

You there's no incentive for you to go faster, for you to get better because that just means in the long run you make less money.

And so that is not a good way to build a business.

So let's talk about what you can do instead.

Let's shift this idea.

Instead of saying, hey, yep, this is what I am, this is my hourly rate.

We are going to create packages that are focused on the outcome.

Because clients don't buy hours, they buy outcomes.

They don't care or really want someone to go in and answer all their emails.

What they want is they want streamlined communication and time Freedom, that's what they want.

Having you go in and do all the emails and all of that like that, that's the process of it.

But that's not the thing that you sell.

It's just like if we were going to go into a doctor's office and we said, these are the problems that we have, we want to know what the outcome is.

How can they make us better?

The process of getting there doesn't really matter.

We want to know how can we have our lives better, how can this pain that we have, how can we make that pain go away, how that happens, it doesn't matter as much as what is it going to be like when that pain is gone.

And so when you're thinking about your packages, when you're thinking about creating, if you're doing portfolios or if you're posting things on social media and you're talking about your business, we're not going to be talking about the process because the way that you do something doesn't really matter.

It's the outcome that you provide.

So this kind of goes along with what we were talking about yesterday of how we are going to be looking at the kind of posts and things we're putting into our portfolios is where we identify the problem and then once we identify that, we talk about the outcome or the solution of that.

So how do we solve the problem and then what's the outcome of that?

We want to focus way more on the outcomes.

What does this do for you?

And when we're putting this all together, this is what is going to help to really streamline our messaging and to make us it.

It makes you sound more of like, you know what you're doing, which you all are smart, that's why you're here.

But we want to make sure that we're showcasing that to our clients and showcasing that to people on social media.

So for example, we talked about email management is the streamlined communication system.

Instead of talking about, oh, I do calendar management, you protect your time and increase productivity.

For the business owner, that's a way better solution.

Or instead of saying, I do project management, you can say, I have consistent product, project delivery and team alignment.

So those are the things that you do.

That's the outcome.

So if you're struggling with, like, what's the outcome of this?

This is where, like, think, heavens, we have AI now.

It makes it so much easier.

You can just go in and say, okay, I want to focus on the outcome.

The outcome that this will do for business owners.

This is what I do.

And if you have a list of here's all the tasks that I do, people don't care about the tasks.

Especially if there's any of you that like, you have cold message people and you're like, hey, are you looking for someone to take over your email and to manage your calendar and like, do your task list of what you do.

And most of the time no one ever responds.

It's because people aren't looking for someone to do tasks for them.

What they're looking for is they're looking for a desired outcome.

So you could take that whole list, put it into AI and say, make this more outcome based and it will start giving you some ideas.

Now, it may not all be like 100% correct, but it gets you on the right path.

I love using AI as a way to just start the creative juices going.

So that's something you do if you're struggling with like, how do I transition this from like, here's my list of tasks that I do to here's a list of outcomes that I provide.

So that's the first thing that you need to do.

Then once you've done that, then you can start structuring your packages and say, okay, for this outcome, this is how much I charge.

For this outcome, this is how much I charge.

Today I want you to start thinking about your pricing and how can we start looking at this more outcome based, more of this solution based versus here's the list of all the tasks that I can do.

Once you have that put together, then we'll be able to go out and build out your actual offer.